Work Out Like a Rich Girl

It's the morning after the Oscars and a recuperative pall rests, gentle as a duvet, over a strangely quiet Beverly Hills. For a few precious hours, the city's elite cadre of trainers and body whisperers are all mine. If I can find them, that is. I arrive for my first appointment, at a blank-looking office building near Rodeo Drive and find…nada. No gym. I check the building's directory. I google. I call the proprietor. "Right," Adam Ernster says wearily. "Take the elevator to the basement." I descend to find yet more unmarked doors—to be cool in L.A., I'm learning, is to be completely without signage—one of which leads to the Bunker, a windowless room with a carefully cultivated aura of secrecy, brocade wallpaper, low lighting, and, yes, rows of shiny silver workout machines. All of it is currently at the disposal of a single client, working out with one trainer, Ernster, who is not dressed like a trainer but instead wears the low-hung jeans and aged T-shirt of a forever-young music exec. Welcome to the world of $200-an-hour (and up) fitness.

In this post–conspicuous consumption era, spending big on working out has become one of few guiltless indulgences left to those with the money to indulge. What could be a worthier investment than one's health? Waiting-list-only classes at SoulCycle and Bari and Barry's Bootcamp are the new norm—at $35 a pop. At three times a week, that's $420 a month. It starts to make the price of your basic gym membership look like chump change. And that's just the classes. Cold-pressed organic juices? Nine-dollar energy bars? One word: Lululemon!

So if merely keeping up with the pack has become an exercise in economics, the mind reels at what it would cost to stay ahead of it. When Katy Perry's getting ready for the Grammys, do you think she's downloading apps or hitting Flywheel? Please. When it comes to getting a perfect body, just what do the rich and famous have access to that the rest of us do not?

1) Help…lots of it

In the home office of celeb trainer Harley Pasternak hangs a guitar from John Mayer, a gift from the time Pasternak sang backup for "Waiting on the World to Change." I stare at it while Pasternak tells me how the times have changed: Once, even a movie star could let things slide a bit between projects. But in the era of 24-7 surveillance, "they look their best all year long," he says. Thus, prepping Amanda Seyfried for her Les Mis performance at the Oscars "is about getting her from really good to amazing."

I practically salivate: surely Pasternak and Co. hold some kind of secret key to unlock "amazing"—otherwise, what are stars paying for? But at Ernster's gym, I alternate between cardio machines and precision reps of lunges and squats; push-ups on a Power Plate vibrating platform (believed to engage the elusive "core"); and feeble attempts to swing the thick nautical ropes that snake across the floor. And at the West Hollywood HQ of Andrea Orbeck—a long, lean blond whose derriere is arguably even more enviable than that of client Heidi Klum—I do a half hour of her preferred butt-blasting cardio (speed walking on a vertiginously steep treadmill setting) followed by another 30 minutes of ballet-inspired leg exercises with a resistance band around my thighs. Both times, I sweat, I strain, I burn. But the biggest surprise about these regimens is that there are no big surprises. No top-secret machines, no NASA-designed supplements: in terms of basic movements and reps and theories, nothing I can't do at some combination of a decent gym and a Physique 57 class. Yet there is a marked, if elusive, point of difference from pretty much all the other workouts I've ever done: the trainers themselves. Among the considerable tools ultraelite experts bring to bear is their own presence, a curious hybrid of guru, motivational speaker, and CEO. Pasternak has written four books, designed a cross-trainer that bears his logo alongside that of New Balance, cohosted a TV show. Orbeck has participated in the TedTalks, for God's sake. I didn't think I needed any of that in a trainer. And yet, sweating it out beside Orbeck, I find myself hanging on the woman's every word. The sheer intellectual level at which she operates demands a different kind of respect—not to mention obedience. And when she recounts the time Karolina Kurkova called her for clarification on the exact series of leg moves I'm struggling through, do I complete that five-jillionth tiny thigh circle? Hell, yes.

2) Discipline…for hire

Even when money's no object, finding the will to make the right choices, day in, day out, no matter what temptation arises, is still up to you. That's why it helps to pay people to be vigilant on your behalf. As Pasternak puts it, "I'm there, I'm part of their lives, I'm e-mailing them, I'm texting them." Even $500-an-hour David Kirsch will do his top-tier clients' grocery shopping. Trainer Terri Walsh ($400 per house call) has been known to launder workout clothes and place Fresh Direct orders.

So, on a post-margarita L.A. morning when the last thing I wanted to do in the world was work out, I was greeted by pure luxury in the form of a 6'4" Swede. My trainer for the morning had been dispatched by Yada Yada Yoga, an agency based in New York and L.A. that arranges all manner of services. Bored of the gym? They'll lead a hike of the Hollywood Hills, or send a professional dancer over to your house to teach you hip-hop dance. Breaking up with the breadbasket? They'll send a nutritionist to monitor your every meal. "Clients will say, 'Every Wednesday we want a mani-pedi; every Tuesday a facial; every Thursday through Sunday a personal chef to cook meals. Massages three days a week, a trainer every day, and yoga twice a week," says Yada Yada founder Jessica Gordon. "We're happy to make them happy."

3) Stuff…to make it chic

Fitness has also gone fashion: Helmut Lang one-shoulder sports bras; Alexander Wang croc-embossed yoga mats. Even the equipment looks good these days. Italian manufacturer Technogym hired the furniture designer Antonio Citterio—whose work resides at MoMA—to mastermind its "kinesis" wall panels. Adorned with just a few bars and silver wires, optional 24-karat gold leaf, and the odd leather bit (made, rumor has it, in the same factory that produces Hermès bags), the systems are baffling at first glance—where does your arm/leg/bum go?—but if, like Giorgio Armani, you can afford one, you can also afford someone to show you how it works.

If you can't, well, at least you can get a good eye roll out of the sheer ridiculousness of it all. For most of us, the closest we'll get to such riches is critiquing the tabloids' "best beach bodies." Must be nice, we sniff, marveling at Jennifer Aniston, still taut and tawny at 44. But deep down, isn't there comfort in knowing that any real sense of competition would be asinine? "Well, yeah," we crow, "If I had what she has, I'd look pretty great too!" Indeed, the entire notion of the rich and famous setting not just our beauty ideals but our standards should be a giant laugh to women everywhere. Ladies, stars—and the people who live like them—are not just like us. Why should we be just like them?

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